Visualizing the Invisible

Words mean what the individual using them thinks that they mean. The person’s definition initially comes from others’ use of a word; there is a kind of cloud of consensus in which a word derives, but looking at dictionaries shows that multiple meanings may be present. And then, building on these, the individual may come to use the word to signal something that differs in significant ways from current usage. An example is phenomenon. The word is rooted in the Greek word meaning “to appear” and is related to phantasm, “an apparition, specter.”  In the eighteenth century is was used to mean “an extraordinary occurrence”—such as, say, seeing a ghost. Later, and ever more aggressively, the word has come to mean “an object or aspect known through the senses rather than by thought or intuition.” This is Webster’s second definition; it is specific in detail in an effort to underline the modern meaning. The first is simply “an observable fact or event.” Here is a word which points to contradictory objects, if we may call them objects at all: strange things we don’t know how we can possibly see—and the objects of ordinary experience. The materialist belief denies that anything can be seen by something other than the senses. Therefore, of course, there are no ghosts, spirits, or what have you. In my own use of the word its meaning is “anything experienced” whether or not sight, sound, touch, taste, or smell are involved or not. A thought is just as much of a phenomenon as the stubbing of my toe.

Let me next contrast two phrases, the “spiritual world” and the “subtle world.” The concept of subtle bodies came into English by way of the founder of the Theosophical Society, Madame Blavatsky, in the nineteenth century and originates in Hinduism. Subtle itself has its root in the Latin tela, web, thus something very finely, thinly woven: the subtle body. Spirit is rooted in Latin as well; it meant “soul” as well as “breath” to the Romans; when the breath leaves the body, all that’s left is that second definition of Webster’s above.

The two words here, at the root, are closely related. Gases are certainly the most “finely woven” of material substances; we might call them subtle matter, accessible only to the touch. Both in the sense of subtle body or spirit, they are convenient pointers to something real (experienced, phenomenal) yet altogether invisible. Over time, however, principally due to the rise of Christianity in the West, a rather wide gulf formed between the conceptualizations of a spiritual and a subtle world. The spiritual gathered to itself a vast body of theological accretions. The invisible world beyond the border took on a radically different character than the world we inhabit on our way there. It is a place of judgement, where our deeds in life are weighed—and all depending on the tilt of the scales we go to heaven, hell, or purgatory. In the first we contemplate God to all eternity; in the other we undergo suffering without end; the third is a kind of reformatory. Viewed as a useful motivational ideology, this model has a certain merit, although it ignores Jesus’ words in John 14:2, “In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.” Three mansion are not what I’d call many, hence there is some indication that the model may be not quite all there is to the end times; they may not be end times.  

The subtle world, by contrast, having a less didactic accretion of meanings, suggests at least two ranges of reality, a dense and a subtle, and if two, why not more, both going up and going down. That the spiritual world becomes quite clearly visible—if the faculties are free to see it—emerges from a study of near-death experiences and deathbed visions. From such sources we also learn that death is experienced as a sudden and very pleasant enhancement of the soul’s faculties, even if no “senses” seem to be necessary for the experience. The only sort of comprehensive view of the beyond on offer comes from Emanuel Swedenborg; in the world he projects there are plenty of mansion of all kinds, rising high and low. Souls are self-sorting. They find the place where they belong. In some real ways death is a transition, tempting me to paraphrase Carl von Clausewitz: “Death is nothing but a continuation of life by other means.” And that continuation will much resemble life here as we lived it. And the invisible will also become visible.

Densities and Subtleties

In the last post I called our material order dense and others (beyond the Borderzone perhaps) subtle. I was using conventional language quite accessible to those who like to wander in mystical orchards, as it were. This sort of wording became popular in West via Madame Blavatsky (1831-1891), the agent behind the Theosophical Society. Thanks to her prolific writings, for those tired of talking of the soul that mysterious entity came to be changed into the subtle body. Subtle, the word itself, comes from the Latin subtilis, and that word gets its hard meaning from tela, or web, and texere, to weave. Fine, thin, delicate, finely woven.

But let’s suppose that this view of things is parochial, rather than accurate, based as it is on sensory experience. Suppose that our material order is thinned out, rarefied—like high-altitude atmospheres were oxygen is not quite enough to let us breathe. And, by contrast, the so-called immaterial order is where all the density resides—but in an energetic form. Is there some basis for this? Yes.

Our physicists are now reluctantly concluding that 96 percent of the cosmos is made up of dark energy (74%) and dark matter (22%)—and, it seems to me, these two may be the same. Back in 1980 already, in his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, David Bohm gave a theoretical grounding for this based on quantum theory. Bohm points out that the smallest possible energy wave present in a vacuum (like space) is 10^-33 cm, but waves down to that very tiny wavelength are present. Anything smaller than that renders concepts like space and time meaningless. He continues:

This [wavelength] is much shorter than anything thus far probed in physical experiments (which have got down to about 10^-17 cm or so). If one computes the amount of energy that would be in one cubic centimeter of space, with this shortest possible wavelength, it turns out to be very far beyond the total energy of all matter in the known universe.

What is implied by this proposal is that what we call empty space contains an immense background of energy, and that matter as we know it is a small, ‘quantized’ wavelike excitation on top of this background, rather like a tiny ripple on a vast sea.… In this connection it may be said that space, which has so much energy, is full rather than empty. The two opposing notions of space as empty and space as full have indeed continually alternated with each other in the development of philosophical and physical ideas. Thus, in Ancient Greece, the School of Parmenides and Zeno held that space is a plenum [fullness]. This view was opposed by Democritus, who was perhaps the first seriously to propose a world view that conceived of space as emptiness (i.e., the void), in which material particles (e.g., atoms) are free to move. Modern science has generally favored this latter atomistic view, and yet, during the nineteenth century, the former view was also seriously entertained, through the hypothesis of an ether that fills all space. Matter, thought of as consisting of special recurrent stable and separable forms in the ether (such as ripples or vortices), would be transmitted through this plenum as if the latter were empty. [p. 190-191]

Such considerations eventually led Bohm to suggests that our cosmos is a limited, unfolded, explicated region within a much greater enfolded, implicated region: Reality.

Applying this to our interests, it suggests that which we call life, soul, subtle body, and so on, may be something energetic, real, but undetectable—its subtlety arising from a failure of our instruments to detect it—whereas our intelligence, also a function of this energetic order, has no problems seeing it at all. If we turn the phrasing around, it is our instruments that are insubstantial, not our souls—like catching a butterfly with a net made of air.

If the Big Bang was a sudden thinning out of the Implicate Order, that process may have deprived the agents present within it, us, of ready access to that which makes us whole; my analogy here is oxygen, but suppose we call it life-force, the Chinese ch’i, the Arabic baraka, the Hindu prana, the western grace. And our project here, in this rarefied dimension, is to collect enough of it to give us the power, once more, to get home.

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To pursue David Bohm’s thought in a strictly scientific context, I recommend The Undivided Universe, 1993.